Should your mission statement be a mission question instead?
Why are questions so interesting and important? A fascinating book by Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas has some answers that have got me thinking. I’ve also been revisiting the basics of brand positioning, brand propositions, mission statements and such things.
Putting the two together (Berger calls it connective inquiry), here’s an interesting question that’s come to mind: what if, instead of mission statements, we created mission questions?
Mission statements are pretty much the same as brand value propositions or statements of company purpose. They all describe the basic “why” of the company – why the company exists and what relevant value does it offer its customers. Which are questions, right?
And we certainly use questions to drill down to the essence of brand purpose as we craft our mission statements. Here are some of the questions we use in our brand strategy engagements with clients along with some similar questions pulled from Berger’s book. If you’re a CEO and haven’t thought about these sorts of questions, it might be worth taking some time to ponder them.
- What business are we really in?
- What is our company’s purpose in this world?
- What does the world need most…that we are uniquely able to provide?
- How do our customers’ lives change as a result of what we do?
- What is true about us, at our core? What will we fight for?
- What are we against? What should we stop doing?
- If we were a cause and not just a company, what would that cause be?
- If I (the CEO) disappeared from the company, what would the new CEO do?
- Where is the place we can be a start-up again?
- If didn’t matter whether we made money or not, how might we approach our business differently?
Another thought about mission statements and questions: The reason for articulating a brand mission statement in the first place is so that it can guide the organization towards implementing the strategy that the statement represents. We call it “operationalizing the brand” for want of a prettier term, and one tool for accomplishing it is the “touchstone question”.
The touchstone question (aka strategic question) is essentially the mission statement or brand proposition expressed in the form of a simple question. The idea is that everyone in the organization, before making any plan or taking any action, should ask themselves the touchstone question as a check. So if CVS pharmacy’s mission statement is “Make CVS easier for customers to use”, a CVS store manager considering a new merchandising schema would automatically ask himself: “will this plan make CVS easier for customers”? If the answer is yes, then he and his plan are aligned with the company’s core strategy.
Well, if the best way to put a mission statement to work is to turn it into a question, why not just make it a question from the beginning? Cut out the middleman.
Here are some sample mission statement-to-question transformations:
| Mission statement | Mission question | |
| CVS | We will be the easiest pharmacy retailer for customers to use. | How can we make CVS the easiest for customers to use? |
| Skype | We keep the world talking for free. | What’s the best way to keep the world talking for free? |
| Pagely | We help the world’s biggest brands scale and secure WordPress. | How will we help the world’s biggest brands scale and secure WordPress? |
| Uber | Uber is the smartest way to get around. | Is this a smarter way for people to get around? |
| Starbucks | We inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time. | What more can we do to inspire and nurture the human spirit? |
| We create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.” | How can we create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce? |
Some final questions to consider: Have you looked closely at your mission statement recently? Does it still make sense? Are you still living up to it? Is it pulling you forward and is everyone in your organization on the mission together?
Would it help in terms of activation and engagement if you had a mission question instead of a mission statement?
No answers here. Just trying some stuff out, asking some questions…
